Lori had just given him so much: wonder, pleasure, laughter.
The very least he could do was give her the truth.
“She was.” He was surprised to find himself picturing Leslie as she had been at nineteen rather than as the unhappy thirty-two-year-old woman he’d had in his head since the day she died. “Very beautiful.”
“Who fell first?” Lori scooted up so that she could fully see his face while still touching him along the length of his body. “You or her?”
There was no jealousy, no pity in Lori’s question, so it was surprisingly easy for him to reply, “We were in college, and she said no the first time I asked her out. Definitely me.”
Lori looked delighted by the tidbit. “Oooh, you had to chase her?”
Even though their bodies were already touching from shoulder to toe, he had to reach out to brush the hair out of her eyes, and stroke his hand off her face as he said, “I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Which I’m sure she found as sexy as I do, by the way,” she said, and then, “Tell me more about her, about the two of you.”
Amazed to realize that Lori’s questions were actually helping him remember and honor his wife in a way he had never been able to since her death, he said, “We got married right after graduation. I went to work in the city for my father’s investment firm, and she got a job working for an interior designer. When we bought our first house out in the country, she left her job to focus on decorating the house and working on charity events and the family we planned to have.” This time Lori was silent as she waited for him to continue. “We had trouble getting pregnant.”
Lori took his hand in hers. She didn’t squeeze it, just held on to him. “That must have been hard.”
He took a breath, one he couldn’t seem to inhale all the way. “Our marriage hadn’t been what either of us had thought it would be. The country house had been our first try at making it better. A child was supposed to be our second. When neither of those worked—”
Grayson stopped, knew he didn’t have to say anything more, that he’d already given away enough. He’d never talked to anyone about this before, not even his parents or Leslie’s.
But, suddenly, being the only one who knew what had really happened seemed like too big a burden to keep bearing all alone.
“Somewhere along the way, she started drinking. But I never knew about what she’d been doing until she crashed into a tree and they told me she was way over the legal blood-alcohol limit. That was when I went home and saw all the signs I’d missed, every last one of the hints she’d been leaving me, just hoping I’d see her. Hoping that I’d be there for her the way I’d once promised when we were young and the world was going to be ours and I refused to have it any other way.”
For a long while, Lori didn’t say a word. She simply put her arms around him and held on tight.
Until, finally, she lifted her head from his chest and said, “Last night, when you took me to that barn dance and pushed me out onto the dance floor, you gave me back my heart, Grayson.” Her mouth was barely a breath from his as she whispered, “And I can’t see how a man who could do something that good could possibly be bad.”
The birds were still chirping, the leaves were still rustling. The chickens still needed their eggs collected, the pigs their stalls mucked. The crops needed weeding and the CSA boxes needed to be assembled. But as Lori kissed him, and he kissed her back before making love to her yet one more time, Grayson knew that everything had changed.
Because he finally knew what it felt like to hold sunshine in his hands...and when Lori left, it was going to feel like winter all year round, even on the hottest days of summer.
Chapter Twenty
The next few days passed in a blur of back-breaking hard work as Lori helped Grayson lay in the boards and beams for the new roof of his cottage while keeping up with all of the usual farm chores. And, of course, there was the wonderful sex they had every night when the animals were finally taken care of and the only thing the two of them needed to focus on until sunrise was each other.
The sex was so good, in fact, that Lori sometimes wondered if she was dreaming. But each morning when Grayson dragged her out of bed at sunrise so that she could make them both breakfast, she knew she wasn’t. A dream would never be so heartless, or make her muscles ache quite so much with his incredibly long lists of work to be done on the farm.
She was taking a ten-second break, dreaming of a tropical beach and a fruity drink, when Grayson rode up on his horse and said, “I need your help with something on the back forty.” He pulled her up onto his horse without so much as a “please.”
“You know,” she said as he wrapped his arms tightly around her waist and rode off with her, “I’m sure I could learn to ride if you could spare a few precious minutes to show me how.”
“Of course you could,” he agreed. “You’d be a natural on horseback. But I want you here with me.”
With his surprisingly lovely words echoing all through her heart, she snuggled deeper against him. “I’d rather be here with you, too.” She honestly couldn’t think of anywhere she’d rather be than out in this beautiful green pasture with Grayson. “So, what are you going to do to work me to the bone now?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
He sounded way too happy with himself and she groaned while stewing in all the possibilities of the torturous work he had planned for her, like digging a ditch or hauling heavy rocks. But when the grass started to turn to sand and he didn’t stop the horse, her suspicions suddenly shifted in another direction.
“Do you own the beach out here, too?”
“Technically, no,” he answered as he finally tied up his horse to a nearby tree and helped her down, his big hands warm on her waist as he stole a kiss. “But since the only way to get to this part of the shore by land is through my property, we’re not going to have to worry about anyone seeing you here naked.”
“Naked?” Her body heated up even as her eyes narrowed. “Are you saying you brought me to the beach to seduce me?”
He pulled a large foil wrapper and a Thermos out of one saddlebag. “I brought lunch, too. For later.”
She loved seeing him like this. Smiling. Playful. Happy. It was how he deserved to be.